July 10, 2007

Lucky Clover

I haven't discussed JJ Abram's Cloverfield project yet. I was waiting until I saw an official version of the teaser than played before American cinemas showing Transformers. We got jipped - we got trailers for Licence to Wed and Die Hard 4.0. YAWN. Anyway. I had seen it in an unofficial bootleg (as if there's ever an "official bootlet"?) of the teaser and thought it was amazing. Well, today's my (and some of you guys' as well) lucky day as an official teaser has gone up on Apple.

It's really quite incredible. In the bootleg copy I watched I hadn't even noticed all those wild roars off in the background. Nor did I notice the man saying "It's alive! It's huge!" Man, this is good. I love the idea of doing a monster movie completely in handheld camera format. And I also love that it's an original idea (from the sounds of it).

It does have three big cons against, though. First is JJ Abrams, the film's producer. JJ's three television programs, Felicity, Alias and Lost all showed no clear idea (to me, anyway) that he can't structure something beyong maybe 2 seasons. Until he manages to create a great premise (which he's done, three times) and make it work for year after year after year I will continue to see him as so incredibly overrated. Secondly, it's director is some guy called Matt Reeves. His only film directorial role was for that deplorably Ross Gellar movie The Pallbearer. Yikes. He has worked in TV a lot, but nevertheless. Thirdly, it's being released in January. This screams to me as an August release, but oh well. Surely it's got to be better than other January fare like Hostel or White Noise or those Madea movies or whatever they are. Surely. Right?






Also, check out Ja at My New Plaid Pants. He actually likes Lost (Maybe it's just because the show has died in Australia, but I'm shocked to read that many people still put themselves through that show) and he's already blogged a bit about this movie. It'll surely be another of the movies he blogs about obsessively, no?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's funny b/c I had just been thinking of Lizzy Caplan and BAM she's in this.

Jason Adams said...

I actually was thiiiiiiiiiis close to giving up on Lost (that's really close) but the boyfriend was still into it so I kept watching and, honest to goodness, it got really great again the last half of the 3rd season. I never watched Felicity and, yeah, Alias seriously lost its way by the third season (but I still watched that through the end too), but they have 100% convinced me that they know where they're going with Lost now. I'm onboard again. Plus, JJ doesn't really have anything to even do with the show anymore; it's run by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse now, and they seem invested in seeing it through the whole way.

Blah. You did not want to hear all that.

But in conclusion, yes, I'll be chattering on "Cloverfield (not its real name)" loads til January. I don't think it getting released in Jan. is any indication of the film's quality, since the film hasn't even finished filming yet; it's just smart counter-programming, I think. I'm looking forward to having something excite me in that usually dull scrap-heap of a month.

Jason Adams said...

Also, great job on the screen-grabs!

Anonymous said...

Lost's second half of this season (S3) is actually some of the best television I've seen since well....Lost S1.

You should give it a try kamikaze. It really does get better.

On to the trailer, I had no idea what this was when i saw it in front of Transformers and when I got home, people were already freaking out. The trailer is all kinds of brilliant and now that I get to see it in HD there are many little hints that I'm sure the people behind it put in there just to see if we know what the hell they're talking about. I mean, the today the trailer hit screens, I went to it's IMDB page and it had NO RESPONSES. I went back the next day, it was 20 pages plus.

The trailer is having in impact on people, that's for sure. I can't wait to see it.

Glenn Dunks said...

See, I write about movie posters being sort of boring a lot of the time, but the same works with trailers. Produce a good trailer and people will talk! It's simple and I don't know why these professionals don't realise this.

I was sure we'd see trailers similar to The Devil Wears Prada, but for some reason they thought that didn't work well enough? Bizarre.

Aaanyway.

I wouldn't wanna start watching Lost now. Maybe DVD some time in the future.

Ja, Felicity was quite good. But, again, it was quite good for only a couple of seasons and then it just kept repeating the same plots over and over.